This study aims to examine how international students experience and interpret digital environmental governance within a university “living lab” context, and what improvements they propose to strengthen sustainability management and inclusion. It examines digital sustainability systems not only as service tools, but as governance mechanisms that shape participation, define what sustainability is visible and normalize behavioral intervention in campus life.
A qualitative single-case study was conducted at a research-intensive university in central China. Written open-ended interviews were collected from 25 international master’s and PhD students and analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis, guided by a socio-technical systems lens and three digital environmental governance dimensions: seeing and knowing, participation and engagement, interventions and actions.
Digital systems embed sustainability in everyday campus life through paperless services, quick response-enabled mobility, utility apps and automated monitoring and feedback. Yet language barriers, fragmented platforms and weak feedback loops limit participation, leaving the living-lab function only partly realized. Students call for a centralized, multilingual “Green Campus” hub with accessible dashboards, clear onboarding and structured co-creation. The findings suggest that digital environmental governance can produce a form of “default sustainability,” where conservation is achieved through automation while students remain only weakly engaged.
Based on written interviews at one institution, this qualitative single-case study does not seek statistical generalization. Instead, it provides analytical insight into how digitally mediated sustainability governance may reproduce unequal participation in internationalized higher education settings.
Universities should integrate sustainability services into a single, multilingual platform, make data student-facing and institutionalize closed-loop feedback and participation pathways.
The study foregrounds international students in smart-campus sustainability and shows how digital infrastructure shapes visibility, legitimacy and intervention. It contributes to the literature by demonstrating that digital sustainability infrastructures can improve environmental performance while limiting democratic participation, thereby extending living lab and digital governance debates to legitimacy, inclusion and micro-level behavioral governance in higher education.
